分类：History of Science & Scholarship

Space and Geometry—Questions for Reflection and Suggestions for Discussion from Teacher Wang’s Lecture

History of Science & Scholarship2010.10.13
Space and Geometry—Questions for Reflection and Suggestions for Discussion from Teacher Wang’s Lecture
http://hps.phil.pku.edu.cn/bbs/read.php?tid=1169 Although Professor Wang’s lecture this time was rather jumpy in content, the reading materials assigned this time are relatively readable. If you read the materials in advance, listening to Professor Wang’s lecture can serve to help the two illuminate each other. I hope everyone will be sure to read the relevant materials, and at the very least must read the second part of *Science and Hypothesis*. In tomorrow’s discussion class, the main speakers and the TAs should discuss more around the materials, and not wander too far afield. Broadly speaking, the issues involved in this lecture and the reading materials are these: 1. What is space? 2. What is…
science Kant space Newton
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2010年10月13日
The Secrets of the Turing Machine

History of Science & Scholarship2010.09.20
The Secrets of the Turing Machine
The second lecture of “What Is Science” was delivered by Yao Qizhi on the life of Turing. Before the class, as a teaching assistant, my dealings with his female secretary already left me with a very bad impression; I hadn’t expected the lecture itself to be disappointing as well. After the lecture I had already written some thoughts, which I’ll paste below first: Frankly speaking, today Teacher Yao’s lecture was disappointing. The introduction to Turing was too watery, and it hardly introduced what Turing’s enormous contribution actually was. It only said that he designed the “Turing machine,” that the Turing machine is a universal computer, that is, the modern computer….
philosophy science history of science mathematics
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2010年9月20日
A Travelogue of the Hailar Conference

History of Science & Scholarship2010.08.24
A Travelogue of the Hailar Conference
The much-noticed Fourth National Conference on Phenomenology and Philosophy of Technology had already passed several days earlier. Teacher Wu asked me to write up the conference record, but I kept putting pen to paper very late. On the one hand I was being lazy; on the other hand, it was also hard to know where to begin. Faced with so many papers and trying to review them one by one, the job really made my head spin… Although I have written records of forums and talks before, the KeKe Forum, for example, was basically just one lecture: an hour of presentation, an hour of discussion, with a commentator in between…
philosophy media Heidegger phenomenology
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2010年8月24日
Theses on Media Ontology

History of Science & Scholarship2010.08.09
Theses on Media Ontology
Abstract: As a philosophical program, media ontology points to a new philosophical line of thought whose origins lie in traditions associated with thinkers such as Heidegger and McLuhan. Media ontology develops its thinking around the everyday meaning of the concept of media, but it seeks to go beyond the everyday understanding of media as a neutral conduit for transmitting messages. Media, as the “extension of man,” also prompts us to rethink media as a way of understanding human nature. Media ontology implies an anthropology that transcends traditional dualism, and it is both a continuation and a surpassing of the Western classical philosophical tradition. Modern philosophy “discovered media,” but media ontology…
philosophy media Heidegger phenomenology
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2010年8月9日
“Proof” and the Mathematical Spirit

History of Science & Scholarship2010.07.18
“Proof” and the Mathematical Spirit
In last week’s assignment I wrote about “proof” and “the foundations of mathematics.” Since it was a response to a set prompt, I wasn’t very satisfied with how it turned out, and now I want to add a few more remarks. For a long time I have admired the concept of “proof” as the fundamental spirit of mathematics, or rather, “proof” is the core of the “mathematical spirit.” The demand for “proof” is what distinguishes mathematics from the technologies of calculation and geodesy, which solve practical problems; it represents an attitude of freedom, reason, and disinterestedness, and one cannot overstate the significance of “proof.” But this emphasis does not mean…
philosophy science mathematics Plato
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2010年7月18日
Plagiarism Is Not Just a Matter of “Academic Norms” — With a Discussion of Relative Legitimacy

History of Science & Scholarship2010.07.16
Plagiarism Is Not Just a Matter of “Academic Norms” — With a Discussion of Relative Legitimacy
The Wang Hui plagiarism incident still has no conclusion, and the debate continues. Just now I saw a reposted article, also a rather typical pro-Wang piece, and it really does make some good points. Though it makes good points, it is actually a maneuver to shift the focus. In substance, it is still absurd and laughable. I’ll first quote the article’s first section (the boldface is mine): http://blog.renren.com/blog/7178/478029071 A Casual Talk on the Wang-Zhu Incident: It Concerns Academic Norms, and Even More, the History of Scholarship 2010-07-14 19:03:37 from: leo 1 The doctoral dissertation Wang Hui published in the late 1980s, Against Despair, has been branded by Wang Binbin with…
scholarship plagiarism Wang Hui
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2010年7月16日
How Should We Understand Why “Proof” Is the Core Concept of the “Foundations of Mathematics”?

History of Science & Scholarship2010.07.02
How Should We Understand Why “Proof” Is the Core Concept of the “Foundations of Mathematics”?
First, it is necessary to note that “proof” is an ancient concept, whereas “mathematical foundations” is a much newer one; ever since ancient Greece, “proof” has been one of the central concepts in the Western mathematical tradition, whereas the topic or subdiscipline of “mathematical foundations” emerged mainly only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The demand for “proof” makes mathematics in Western culture different from arithmetic and surveying. Mathematics pursues not merely the obtaining of a valid result, but even more the process of rigorous deduction and argumentation. But even within the Western tradition, the understanding of mathematical proof has by no means been static. And the reason…
philosophy science mathematics logic
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2010年7月2日
Has Chaos Theory Overturned the Determinism of Classical Physics? (Philosophy of Physics Assignment)

History of Science & Scholarship2010.06.27
Has Chaos Theory Overturned the Determinism of Classical Physics? (Philosophy of Physics Assignment)
Physics Philosophy Assignment • 1. Does chaos theory overturn the determinism of classical physics? I do not think chaos theory overturns the determinism of classical physics. Perhaps chaos theory forces the worldview of classical physics to be redrawn, and determinism will also have to be rearticulated, but I am afraid “overturn” is too strong a word. What is called determinism involves, at the very least, two levels of question. One is ontological, the other operational. Determinism in classical physics first means this: the entire world is determined by strict causal relations; present events are caused by prior ones, and a determinate cause will necessarily lead to a determinate result. Therefore,…
science mathematics physics determinism
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2010年6月27日
Why Post Grades?

History of Science & Scholarship2010.06.22
Why Post Grades?
The course in the history of science has always posted the grades for homework and the final exam online. When I took it back then, I checked my grades on Professor Wu’s personal homepage, whereas now they are usually posted on the BBS. Every time grades are posted, there is inevitably some questioning: by making classmates’ information public like this, what about their privacy and so on? Here I might as well explain the reasons for doing it. First of all, the very notion of “privacy” is strange. Why are grades a student’s privacy? I have only heard that the exam scores of primary and secondary school students cannot be…
scholarship education Peking University Wu Fei
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2010年6月22日
A Preliminary Exploration of Heidegger’s Media Ontology

History of Science & Scholarship2010.05.11
A Preliminary Exploration of Heidegger’s Media Ontology
I’ve once again squeezed this out at the very last moment… abstract and table of contents still pending… A Preliminary Inquiry into Heidegger’s Media Ontology 1 When Heidegger’s philosophy of technology is mentioned, what often comes first to mind is Heidegger’s late “question concerning technology,” the thought of technology as revealing, as a mode in which truth happens, as the consummated form of metaphysics, as well as propositions such as the fourfold of earth and sky, mortals and divinities, and poetic dwelling. Technology is unquestionably a keyword of Heidegger’s late thought. Yet the crucial significance of the technological question in Heidegger’s thought, and Heidegger’s important status as a philosopher of…
media Heidegger phenomenology paper
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2010年5月11日